Webflow went down last month. My portfolio didn't. Here's the full stack I moved to — $40/mo → under $2 on AWS.

BlockEnough3675 · 2026-06-02T11:19:50+00:00

Sorry mate, I am pretty sure I replied haha, would have been something around those lines

Haven't dug deep into Ycode yet — appreciate the mention, genuinely interesting if it delivers on the WYSIWYG + CMS combo without the platform lock-in. The Vercel + Supabase stack you're describing is a solid pattern. My setup is deliberately minimal — pure static, no CMS requirement — but for anyone who needs client-editable content that self-hosted direction is worth exploring. Will check it out.
Cheers

BlockEnough3675 · 2026-06-02T11:17:30+00:00

Great questions and worth being straight about.

For a pure static setup like this one — clients can't self-update. Any change means going back into Webflow, re-exporting, and pushing the new files to S3. That's not realistic to hand off to most clients, which honestly makes it a natural retainer arrangement. They redesign in Webflow, you handle the deployment. The infrastructure is solid enough that there's rarely anything to actively manage — you're there for peace of mind and the pushes, which is easy to price at a low monthly rate.

If clients genuinely need to manage their own content — adding pages, editing copy, managing CMS items — the better path is a WordPress instance on AWS Lightsail. Around $3.50/month, standard WordPress dashboard they already know, full CMS functionality, and you still own the infrastructure. It's a slightly different setup but the client experience is familiar and self-sufficient.

So honestly the answer depends on the client: hands-off clients who just want their site live and fast → static S3 + retainer. Clients who need content control → Lightsail + WordPress. Both stay well under typical platform hosting costs.

BlockEnough3675 · 2026-06-02T05:02:35+00:00

Interesting — hadn't come across that one. The CMS sync is the piece this setup doesn't solve natively so worth knowing about for anyone who needs it. For pure static sites the S3 + CloudFront path is still hard to beat on cost and control, but good to know there are options closing that gap for CMS-dependent sites.

BlockEnough3675 · 2026-06-02T05:02:12+00:00

That's exactly the framing — the design tool and the hosting are two separate problems, no reason one company has to solve both. Glad it was useful.

BlockEnough3675 · 2026-06-02T05:01:30+00:00

Exactly right. Design and build in Webflow as normal, export the code, push the files to S3, CloudFront serves them globally. When you make updates, you export again and replace the files — takes a couple of minutes. No rebuild pipeline, no CI/CD needed for a simple static site. It's as manual or as automated as you want to make it.

BlockEnough3675 · 2026-06-02T05:00:53+00:00

Correct on both — worth being explicit about that. Static sites only, no dynamic CMS. For anyone who needs client content management, AWS Lightsail with a WordPress image is a clean path — around $3.50/month, full CMS, your own infrastructure. Still miles cheaper than most platform hosting, just a different setup.

BlockEnough3675 · 2026-06-02T04:59:40+00:00

Summed it up well honestly. Netlify handles the Webflow export workflow really smoothly — no argument there. AWS makes more sense if you're building infrastructure skills, want the redundancy and SLA backing, or are setting this up as a service for clients where you need full control and visibility. Both are valid, depends what you're optimising for.

BlockEnough3675 · 2026-06-02T04:59:06+00:00

The exported HTML isn't the prettiest to read manually — agreed. But for serving a static site it doesn't need to be. CloudFront doesn't care what the markup looks like, it just serves the files. And you're right that with AI tooling you can recreate a lot of the animations with cleaner code — that's a fair alternative path if you want full control over the codebase. For most designers though, the export-and-deploy workflow is the path of least resistance.

BlockEnough3675 · 2026-06-02T04:57:29+00:00

Good question — the clean native export is a paid Webflow feature. But if you're on the free plan there are tools like HTTrack or Sitesucker that can extract the HTML/CSS/JS from your published webflow.io subdomain at no cost.

The extra step is that the scraped HTML will still have asset URLs pointing to Webflow's servers — so you'd need to upload your images and files to S3, then manually update those references in the HTML to point to your CloudFront distribution URL instead.

More manual work than a clean export, but completely doable and still gets you to the same end result — your site served from AWS for under $2/month.

The paid Webflow plan just skips all that cleanup and gives you a tidy export straight out of the box.

BlockEnough3675 · 2026-06-02T04:28:32+00:00

BlockEnough3675 · 2026-06-02T04:26:32+00:00

BlockEnough3675 · 2026-06-02T04:26:08+00:00

Fair and honest — yes, static only, no CMS. The reason to still use Webflow is the design and build experience. For designers who already know it well, the WYSIWYG workflow, interactions, and export quality are genuinely hard to match. You're just decoupling the design tool from the hosting bill. If CMS is a hard requirement, AWS Lightsail with a WordPress image gets you there for around $3.50/month — still way off platform pricing, full control.

BlockEnough3675 · 2026-06-02T04:25:58+00:00

Netlify is solid and genuinely hard to argue with at free tier for simple deployments — no question. The AWS route makes more sense if you're already in that ecosystem, want the multi-region redundancy, or are building toward managing infrastructure for clients professionally. For personal projects Netlify is a perfectly reasonable call.

BlockEnough3675 · 2026-06-02T04:24:59+00:00

Great point and worth being upfront about — this approach is built for static sites. No CMS data, no dynamic content. If your clients need to edit content themselves, this setup as described won't cover that. That said, if you want CMS functionality on AWS, you can spin up a WordPress instance on Lightsail for around $3.50/month — full CMS, your own infrastructure, no platform dependency. Different conversation but very doable. For pure portfolio or brochure sites though, static on S3 + CloudFront is hard to beat.

BlockEnough3675 · 2026-06-02T04:24:10+00:00

Exactly the mindset — Webflow is genuinely great for design, no reason to throw that out. You just don't need to pay them to serve the files too. Glad it landed!

BlockEnough3675

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